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After being pulled to the ground at the Brit Awards last night, “Matador Madonna” may be nursing a bruise today but it’s nothing compared to the bullring suffering she is shamelessly trivialising.

Choosing a bullfighting theme for her ill-fated performance of Living for Love, the pop icon disgusted animal lovers by assuming the role of a matador and singing among dancers with horns on their heads.

Earlier this month, after Madonna donned a similar matador-inspired outfit at the Grammys, B Akerlund the stylist behind the cringeworthy costumes declared: “I think the whole relationship between the matador and the bulls is something that we find a beautiful relationship, and we played on that – how she’s killing off the bulls and she’s the matador standing in the end.”

And there was more nonsense from Akerlund as she added: “There’s a beautiful story for why the matadors fight the bulls and that also reflects life.”

To describe what happens in a bullring as beautiful, Akerlund clearly doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, about the ugly reality.

Madonna is certainly aware of the cruelty. At the end of her promo video for “Living for Love”, she includes a quote from Friedrich Nietzche – “Man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies, bullfights and crucifixions, he has felt best on earth.”

Far from being beautiful, bullfighting is brutal, barbaric and bloody.

Claiming the lives of thousands of bulls every year, it subjects each of its victims to the most horrific of suffering. Each bullfight involves the slow torture to death of six or more bulls and the terror starts behind the scenes, before the fight, when the bull is severely handicapped. Cotton wool is stuffed into its nose to hamper breathing, vaseline is smeared into its eyes to blur vision and its horns are often painfully filed down to distort its sense of direction.

The worst is yet to come however. Once in the arena, horseback riders weaken the bull by stabbing its neck and shoulders with long, sharp lances. Then, to make it lower its head into the typical charging pose, six hooked spears are forcefully driven into the bull’s neck muscles. The cruelty culminates with a fatal stabbing through the heart with a sword. Afterwards, the bull’s ears and tail are cut off and thrown to the crowd. Horses are also victims, often being gutted, gored and killed.

ACTION ALERT

Join us in urging Madonna and B Akerlund to ditch the matador costumes and stop trivialising one of the world’s worst acts of animal cruelty.

Tweet to @Madonna @BAkerlund Ditch the matador costumes and stop trivialising one of the world’s worst acts of animal cruelty
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